Killing Money Book within months and rebuilding it as a budgeting app (2012)

What was closed was not the technology but the way it was sold

What this decision shows is less the speed of the retreat than the line it drew between what to discard and what to keep. What Money Book had sold was the connection of showing each other your assets, and it was only that part that went unused. The machinery underneath — connecting automatically to financial institutions, pulling in the statements, sorting them into categories — survived intact, having barely been used at all. What Tsuji closed was not the technology the company had built, but the selling proposition attached to it.

Because the rebuild came six months after incorporation, what was lost amounted to a few months of development and the word chosen for the company’s name. The same decision taken at five million users would not have gone the same way. Money Forward reached ¥50.3bn of revenue in the year to November 2025, most of it from the corporate back-office business. The company’s name endured; the service the name came from was the first thing to disappear.